Welcome to Total Annihilation: Twilight
What is Total Annihilation: Twilight
Put simply,
TA:T is an extension of OTA (Original TA), balancing old units and
adding in new ones, as might have happened had Cavedog (The maker of
Total Annihilation) not gone out of business and continued to update
TA.
Take a look at some of the features of TA:T
TA: Twilight strives to make all of the original
units useful, as well as adding in new ones to fill strategic roles,
all while keeping the original TA feel. While there are many units,
they have been added for the purpose of filling specific roles and to
generally improve gameplay and fun, and not just so we can say we have
lots of units. The idea is that every unit should have a good reason to
be built and used. There are some units that are more specialized, and
whose ideal situation may not happen all of the time, but the goal is
to never have a unit that is just not worth building, either because it
is worthless in the first place, or because other units do what it does
just as well. Some overlap is fine, as long as each overlapping unit
has a solid reason to be built in and of itself.
From
the Absolute Annihilation Twilight Betas to Total Annihilation: Twilight
Here's the short summary of where we came from:
Twilight had been a player of the Absolute
Annihilation mod for quite a while (Which was itself descended from the
very popular UberHack TA mod), but when Caydr, the maker of Absolute
Annihilation, decided to stop supporting the OTA version and only
release new versions for the Spring engine, Twilight asked for
permission to continue to work on AA and release new versions of it.
Caydr granted this permission, and so since
about November of 2005, Twilight had been maintaining and releasing
"Twilight Betas" of Absolute Annihilation, which continued to fix bugs
and adjust balance issues found in AA version 6.0. For a few months the
forums had been hosted at Caydr's own website,
www.caydr.com, but an
announcement on the front page of the site
on January 30th, 2007 stated that he was too busy to keep the site
going, and was going to let it lapse. The "Twilight Betas" had changed
things substantially since Twilight had taken over development, and he
wanted to avoid confusion between the latest "Beta" (Released February
13th, 2007) and the last "official" release of Absolute Annihilation
for the TA engine (Instead of the Spring engine), which was put out in
the summer of 2005. Because of this, Twilight had been planning to
break off and rename the mod, so that he could drop the tenuous "Beta"
pretense, and just develop this new mod officially. Caydr's
announcement sounded like a good excuse to get that moving, and so,
with deep thanks to TAUniverse's gracious hosting, Total Annihilation:
Twilight began!
Since taking over in November 2005, Twilight
released about 12 new "beta" versions of the AA mod, ending with
Twilight Beta 5.7. Instead of 5.8, the next version was Total
Annihilation: Twilight v1.0, released in March of 2007 (Lately there is
about 1 new version released every month or two, depending on the
number of changes made). TA:T is now up to version 1.5a, and Twilight
continues working with the community on fixing bugs, balancing units,
adding in new units to fill needed roles, etc. TA:T has a small but
active community who post quite frequently in the forums regarding
balance, new ideas, etc, and we usually have several multiplayer games
going on each day and evening.
We are a very welcoming and friendly group of
people, and primarily are looking to find new people to play with
on-line and introduce to the fun of TA. We have started a tournament
recently, but generally just play friendly games. Veteran players and
newcomers alike are both welcome!